Customer Success – A win win story

In our pursuit to help startup and SMEs in their digital transformation journey, we often come across with very generic sales problems, and most of the problems are due to lack of basic understanding of customer engagement and pitching the solution or product poorly. In this post we have listed some of the points which we practice to overcome these problems –

Understanding the customer –

When you try to help the customer even before tagging them as customers, You should really understand them. That means you need to study the their environment and how they operate in their business ecosystem, their geographical situations and their pain points. We had our success rate increased multifold just by practicing this. To understand this better let’s get into what it means on the ground. One of our client who is an independent career counselor, a typical sales package looks like “A Promotional Website, Mobile Application and a lot of social marketing” at first glance. On a careful consideration it was realised that only doing this will not help them instead might increase operational overhead, hear us out how and why –

A Promotional website need to be targeted to audience and the place this client of our operates from, the audience are still not tech savvy which means their reach to technology is limited to Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram at most and not even to twitter, hence a promotional website is going to be a dead investment for a long time. Same time an app may solve a lot of problem but is costly due to the fee they charge to their customers is very nominal and the profit is not enough to cover the investment. People who know about career counseling will agree that this job is difficult to manage remotely and therefor social marketing through electronic media will attract the leads which will be difficult to convert into sales.

Solving the real problem –

Now once we understood the customer portfolio, it is important to solve the real problem and one should identify it before that. The pain point is, it is not going to be obvious and customer wouldn’t be able to tell you the exact problem. If we rely on customer, almost all the time, all the customers have one single generic problem and that is “Sales not happening or Sales is not increasing as expected” that is it. If you take that problem and try to solve it, you will not succeed because that is never ending pursuit, it is a symptom not a problem. The actual problem may be wrong market segment, non-scalable business model, a generic product or non innovative solution, hence it is important to understand client really have sales not happening is a by product symptom of it.

Keeping the business always in context –

You understood your customers, you identified the problem too, you have a solution just right, however have you consider that make sense for business or not? For example there are all the great equipments and machines to do the farming, you get that to the farmers with subsidised rate all set to work and plow the field, but if the most fertile land and farms have water logging problem all your investment will sink into it and for sure that wouldn’t grow into any kind of corps, what could have been a better solution is to create a sustainable ecosystem of animal husbandry keeping livestock such as cattle, poultry and fish will yield better result and can be utilised in the fertile farms to do farming for double profit and that is what it means to keep the business always in context.

Offering real value –

Work towards the common goals and don’t promise unrealistic non-practical benefits. A website in any forms only has certain goals to achieve, it is not a silver bullet and can not make the business succeed overnight. As we always say “Technology is a business enabler” , it can only enable business to grow and sustain, for example, without proper research on main objective and content of a website,  which is to have engaging content and services to offer. it doesn’t make any sense to throw out a lot of add-ons like SEO, SSL mailbox and other because these doesn’t have any individual value of its own. The point is don’t sell technology in the name of solution. Offer them real solution which adds value to their business and let the technology facilitate and help achieving that.

Train them to utilise it for maximum gain –

Offering technology solution is just not enough. It is important to train the customer to use it. Not always your customers are going to be tech savvy and technology might be only solution in such case it is better to teach them how to use it effectivity. For example which phone would you suggest to a 60 + years of indian customer ? The answer is there is no phone which target this segment specially and this segment have their own challenges i.e touch screen phones doesn’t give them taptic feedback out of the box so they don’t know the action they took happened or not, on the other hand phone which gives taptic feedback i.e the phone with keyboards have really small display and due to their poor eyesight that means by the time they realise who is calling the call would be dropped. In this case the only solution is to teach them enabling taptic feedback present in the touchscreen phone with vibration and key tone and help them to adopt it.

DevOps – Value Proposition for SME’s

DevOps is a methodology which solves the operational and logistics challenges of technology Delivery.

What is DevOps –

Imagine these scenarios –

  • Scaling up your Technology infrastructure and Landscape for another geographical region
  • Scaling up your Online Marketplace for Thanksgiving or Black Friday sale
  • Recovering from a massive data center failure
  • How to improve Go To Market Time, to improve customer satisfaction ?
  • How to improve delivery time to the customers?  
  • How to get faster ROI ?

To address above points what is your game plan? How much is automation involved here? How much manual effort and time does it cost? Is there a way that these all can be optimised? Answer is DevOps. If you have it in place you are already ahead of most competitors. To get the details on how these questions get answered by DevOps keep reading ..

DevOps In Business

Why is DevOps important ?

Advancement today has set for a world which is full of new technology that change at fast pace like Big Data, Internet of Things, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and so on. Inspired by these just-in-time development and business process improvement, DevOps has become a global trend in the tech industry.   

Advantage of DevOps –

DevOps is a culture,  where as the term suggests Development (Dev) and Operations (Ops) teams align much closer together and share in-between knowledge in improved ways. But DevOps is much more than this – it is a ‘state of mind’, a common approach to a problem. Businesses today has a point in implementing DevOps only if it’s directly contributing to the company’s increased productivity, effectiveness and, profitability. The only way that it is possible for small and medium enterprises is when the Development and Operations team work in sync and streamlining the provision of tech solutions that solve the business needs. Moreover Unbounded collaboration is achieved with notably higher rates of employee loyalty and engagement.

How to improve delivery time to the customers?

Analysis- DevOps methodologies when implemented in business models enable to break the complex and big projects into smaller modules of functionality that can be delivered on a steady rate. Hence the clarity and speed up of the release schedules and delivery timeline are reduced, allowing to create a buffer for any future changes on the same project.

Recovering from a massive data center failure

Analysis- Research also show that DevOps companies have an almost supernatural advantage of 30x the deploy frequency of their non-DevOps peers. Meantime to recovery process of DevOps also reduces 168x reduction to recover customer failures.

How to get faster ROI ?

Analysis- DevOps allows a business to release twice as fast, they can effectively double their annual revenue.Getting Paid for Faster returns in DevOps Is basically, reverse-chronological order of importance for an ongoing business:

  • Get money after you bill.
  • Bill after you deliver benefit.
  • Deliver benefit after you ship.
  • Ship after you’ve made the product.
  • Get money to make product.

Over a mid to long term duration there is 20% increase in annual revenue would be on par with enterprise averages, thus definitely a better ROI.

 

How to improve Go To Market Time and improve customer satisfaction ?

Analysis- Failure in DevOps is a mandate notion which is taken as a must to happen in real world. DevOps provides embracing the notion that you will fail and that you should even practice failing, this is a key mental step to focusing on meantime to recovery (MTTR). Moreover the process of Continuous deployment = continuous feedback allows  a chance to test users’ satisfaction in real time, adjust their products to customers’ needs, thus shaping a tighter market-product fit. Hence reducing failure factors in business models.

 

Realisation of the Hour!

DevOps for business

Currently Agile teams used automated build, test automation, Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery.

With DevOps that is extended further to “Infrastructure as Code”, configuration management, metrics and monitoring schemes, a toolchain approach to tooling, virtualisation and cloud computing to accelerate change in the modern infrastructure world. DevOps brings some tools on the block as well like configuration management (puppet, chef, ansible, cfengine), orchestration (zookeeper, noah, mesos), monitoring, virtualisation and containerisation (AWS, OpenStack, vagrant, docker) and many more. This makes the SME’s prosper with clients much better.

It makes ONE team with an objective to delivery software fully to the customer. So DevOps becomes the need of the hour for an organisation aiming to stay ahead of the competition. Get in touch with us if you would like to implement DevOps within your organisation or simply need any consultation or advice on it.

Technology as Business Enabler

We strongly believe that technology is an enabler for business Here is how we think technology can help to gain momentum for the business –

Real life implementation Challenge

An ordinary artist with extraordinary craftsmanship, a living embodiment of the miraculous fine portfolio of paintings, pottery and jewellery, yet sadly have painful need to knock each door, just to sell his valuable, handmade articles. Imagine how far can his feet can walk, each step forward results into loss of energy and his most valuable possession i.e “Time”.

Just then he learns startups also shares the same passion of serving customers, but ofcourse, in a much better way. The nerves of technology powers the machinery of supply chain. With these startups at his disposal and great technology as a leverage, success comes by design not by luck. Selling products online and meeting the demand of customers becomes a super sustained, self managed affair.

 

Plan to make the business always ready for market ?

Shopping Cart for MarketTechnology today is the foundation for all success. Falling behind the Technology Curve, that compares the linear growth of technology and the rate of change is simply not possible. Today industries have become obsessed to achieve maximum efficiency at minimal cost. Modern businesses can’t afford to be technology laggards. Bridging the gap between today’s technology and tomorrow’s innovations is essential to transitioning seamlessly.

 

 

Keep a track of latest technology trends?

Tracking Device Improving ROI by infusing technology has always been a primary purpose for any business. Starting with the goals we want to achieve, and then plan backwards, finding a suitable technology that supports and improve performance to expected benchmark. This is what makes business and technology work hand in hand. After all “Technology doesn’t drive success: people using technology do”. Staying abreast of the latest trends allows a business to pivot before competitors can react.

 

 

Strategy Shifts and plan to adapt changes

Change by wrench Today Enterprises can no longer afford to think only in terms of efficiency and the 10-year plan. The new business model relies on fluidity: a company poised to pivot is one that’s best prepared for the future. We need to focus less on tomorrow and live in the present as that would make an impact.

The technical shifts today can no longer be limited to upgradation of system being done once. Trend says this era “Change is the only constant”. Oracle which was once known for its database models is towards being outdated, as today the cloud is becoming the core paradigm for delivering business technology, with an aspirational promise of “zero infrastructure which says anything-as-a-service”. Since the workers and management in the zone of business become more dependent on tech, they are increasingly able to help out with the process of digital change and transformation. So for business the digital transformation is required, however, it may be complex, time consuming, and expensive, and it affects every aspect of the enterprise.

 

Correct Go To Market Strategy?

Head thinking about go to market strategyA careful crafted plan on approach of marketing product and services, is the need. Do we need a website and if yes what kind of website? Is having mobile application at this time is right thing or should we wait? Worry not we would soon cover this topic in detail about what needs to be done and exactly in what order ?  Since the commercialisation and use of technology became more widespread throughout the world, the adoption of advanced products can generate new business opportunities and various benefits.

 

Pricing and decision before choosing a technology

The market today stands long-term visible capability of the decision makers.The wise ones choose a developed product with considering below points –

  • Should encourage designers to explore Creative Routines and apply them in work.
  • Should encourage developers to explore Understanding Routines and apply them in work.
  • Should encourage parents to study Visible Thinking and encourage their children to try them.
  • Should not only develops solution for SME’s but also provide a supportive system for their backup.

 

Checkpoints for latest technology trends

Remember CheckpointsFew Instances of technological boost is once there was an era where it was all cash, then it was credit cards, and now it’s time to start to accept mobile payments. These make daily transactions much simpler. Similarly today current tech can help business keep track of all the necessary documents, invoices, deductions, and expenditures and made that all a little less painful by generating and tracking invoices way more better than manual work. Hence the best business growth is with trending techs, you need it you get it.

To help progress and success thrive, the first step is research to check whether there is a more recent, advanced program, app, or tech development that can aggregate multiple needs into one process. Thus the latest technology trends can make your job easier and will also show the customers that business is modern and evolving. What’s needed is to keep up with what’s hot in the industry and make the effort to integrate the technology that’s best for your business.

 

Here in AppsWise we try to solve a business scenario in most optimised and efficient technical way, by keeping all the edge cases in mind for any SME’s to grow. Get in touch with us for any challenges you deal with in technology scope or even if you just want to optimize your technology operations.